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After some more deliberation, I think Cargo wins. Cargo's querying syntax is more like SQL (which is actually useful and pretty easy to learn), and Cargo also doesn't deal with all of the property declarations that Semantic Mediawiki requires. Also, Cargo has native support for JSON exporting, while SMW doesn't (and any extensions that provide such support are pretty stale).
== CSS Design (4/22/2016) ==
Couple of notes on where "obvious" (hint: not so obvious) things are. (Note, all paths that follow are relative to the Mediawiki root directory, which should be in /var/lib/mediawiki).
First, the logo for the page is defined in LocalSettings.php. Look for the $wgLogo variable. I used a FTP client to upload new logos, but you could use a terminal and wget the file if you have it online somewhere.
For changing CSS rules, I just used the Chrome inspector (F12 or right-click and choose "Inspect" from the option menu) to understand which CSS selector rules were being applied and which were being overridden. You can also make small CSS changes in the inspector that are lost upon refreshing the page, but can be useful for experimenting with different colors, positions, etc.
You can use $ grep -r "[words_to_search_for]" on the command line to search for something (a CSS hex color code, a CSS selector, etc.) in all files and directories in the current directory. I usually used this while in the skins/Vector directory to make finding CSS properties easier.
The CSS is actually written in LESS, which is an extension of CSS syntax that allows you to do nested properties, variables, etc. The skins/Vector/variables.less file has all the variables, which are prefixed with an at sign (@) in LESS. WARNING: if you try to use a variable name that hasn't been defined (due to a typo, for example), ALL of the CSS/LESS will stop working. The plus side is that its obvious that you messed up. The down side is that it may not be obvious where exactly you messed up, so make small changes and refresh the browser view constantly. Other than that, most of the other LESS rules are in the skins/Vector/components folder. The file names are fairly reasonable: common.less defines rules common to the entire page, navigation.less defines the area on the left sidebar, personalMenu.less defines the set of links in the top right corner for the user account, footer.less defines the footer. There's also another file in skins/Vector that is useful for understanding how everything comes together: VectorTemplate.php, which contains the high level HTML structure.
== To-do list ==
